


No one falls in love under fluorescent light

by scapegrace74



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Atmospheric Semi-Resolved Pining, F/M, I'm Making Up Tags as I go along!, Maudlin Porn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-19
Updated: 2020-08-19
Packaged: 2021-03-06 01:34:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 782
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25995301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scapegrace74/pseuds/scapegrace74
Summary: I was listening to the new Stars album and inspiration struck.  This fic shamelessly borrows from their song Fluroscent Light.  I’m thinking late Season 3, but this is a choose-your-own-season fic.  I went in thinking smut, but apparently not exactly.
Relationships: Fox Mulder/Dana Scully
Comments: 8
Kudos: 25





	No one falls in love under fluorescent light

It was April. It was April, it was Friday night, and it was raining. He hummed at a frequency picked up by spy satellites, fruit bats, and stray dogs in heat. He was a plasma ball, reaching out tentacles of energy towards any conductive touch. Come to think of it, that was an altogether too apt analogy - Nicola Tesla toiling away in monomaniacal celibacy through the thin hours of the night.

He paced, dribbled his basketball, started then discarded two separate skin flicks and finally slouched like a sulky teenager on his couch, cupping his cellphone like a live grenade.

Odd number of bars, he calls her.

Even number of bars, he whacks off and goes to sleep.

He glanced at his phone, shook it hard, glanced again, then dialed the familiar number.

“This had better be good, Mulder,” she answered.

“Come out with me tonight.”

If the evening yielded nothing else, he’d finally proven his partner didn’t have an answer for everything.

…

The bass vibrated the fillings in his teeth. Rain-soaked air blew in from the street, where a rank of taxis stood like yellow sentinels. The beer tasted like warm piss, but that wasn’t stopping them from amassing an impressive collection of empty bottles.

He isn’t sure what he expected when he chose this particular bar as their destination for the evening. Maybe he hoped that seeing Scully out of her element, a polished gem in filthy surroundings, would snap him out of whatever base impulse had seized hold of him. Instead she looked right at home, tousle-haired, kohl-rimmed Windex eyes and a well-worn black leather jacket, pulling on a beer by the throat, and he knew he was in real danger of committing the eighth cardinal sin of law enforcement - thou shall not fuck your partner.

They spoke, in as much as speech was possible over the car crash of electric instruments, but she gave nothing away, waiting him out. He was charming and offhand by turns, with neither having a profound effect on her poise. There were a thousand nights of loneliness on the table between them, and a thousand miles of history in her eyes.

He willed telepathic messages to her through the thick air.

Nothing ever changes between us, Scully. If you work from that base principle, the corollary is that I will never lose you, and you will never lose me. You could walk away tomorrow, and when I died you’d still be the most significant person in my life. Say you feel the same. Prove to me you feel the same.

…

The lights came up in the middle of a maudlin love song and they started their long stumble home, pitched together in an isosceles triangle of attraction. There was a thin margin for error when inebriation was the plausible deniability card you were holding in reserve. Drunk enough to set fire to the rule book, sober enough to control the flames.

The cab driver pushed the issue to the forefront, needing a destination before he could drive. They sat like sprinters in the starting blocks, eyeing each other warily, neither wanting to jump the gun, until he finally yielded and gave his address. Her complicit silence was the loudest statement she’d ever made in their years’ long conversation.

…

Pulling her arm high above her head, he dragged his fingers down her delicate hidden surfaces until he reached the borderland of her hipbone. Scully had worn black lace panties to meet him at a grimy bar, and it told him all he needed to know about the course of the next few hours.

He was bursting with that same aching need that drove him earlier, a relentless urge to beg the question, force the issue, fire now and aim later. It was lust, but it was equally his hatred of stasis. They were brittle from habit, and he wanted to smash them free.

He petted her with his tongue, and she curled like the finest sable into his touch. It was overwhelming at a visceral level, affecting her this way, and hearing her soft cries echoing from the solitary corners of his apartment.

She shimmered and billowed like an unfurled sail beneath him as he worked secret runes into her flesh, deeper than any tattoo. Bodies met like thunderheads, and words of pleasure rained down from the precipice to which they clung. In time they were obliterated, erased and set free by the avalanche of release.

…

She dressed quietly, a reel of damning evidence running in reverse. His body felt adhesive, flattened against the sweaty sheets by the gravity of a thousand suns. Between them they’d found an answer, and a thousand questions more.


End file.
